Why Harris’ fascism charges might not land with voters

Americans are strikingly comfortable with “unchecked power” — as long as it’s exercised by their own party.

The closing days of the 2024 campaign have been saturated with the f-word: fascist.

Bob Woodward’s new book quotes Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as calling Donald Trump “a fascist to the core.” John Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff, told the New York Times this week that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist.”

And, last night, in a televised town hall, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Kamala Harris if she felt Trump is a fascist. “Yes, I do,” she responded. “Yes, I do.”

Earlier in the day, Harris deliver remarks at the vice president’s residence, highlighting Kelly’s other comments about Trump preferring the “the dictator approach to government” and expressing a desire for generals like Adolf Hitler’s. “The bottom line is this,” she said. “We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be: What do the American people want?”

In other words: Will anyone be swayed by two of Trump’s top advisers calling him a fascist? Does this make for a compelling closing argument for Harris?

On its face, you might think so. After all, dictatorship and fascism aren’t exactly popular here in America. According to a recent YouGov poll, only 5% of Americans said they had a “very or somewhat favorable” opinion of either form of government. (Compared to 80% who said the same about democracy.) That would suggest that linking Trump to these very unpopular descriptors should be toxic for his campaign.

Of course, here in the real world, there’s a fair amount of skepticism that that will be the case. Any number of theories have been thrown out to explain why. Perhaps, as Ben Shapiro posited, voters are simply more worried right now about crime and inflation than about potential threats to democracy. Perhaps voters are suspicious of the rhetoric, seeing as Trump didn’t become a dictator in his first term.

Maybe these attacks just don’t stick to Trump specifically, as evidenced by his favorability rating — which has remained somewhat stable since winning the 2016 election, no matter what’s been thrown at him:

Source: RealClearPolitics

Or, maybe, there’s a much simpler explanation, one that has nothing to do with Trump at all: Rank partisanship.

In a 2020 paper published in the American Political Science Review, Yale researchers Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik tried to put a number on how many Americans were willing to abandon a candidate aligned with their political tribe in the name of protecting democracy. The number they came up with: 3.5%.

Graham and Svolik conducted an experiment in which 1,700 respondents were given 16 different candidate match-ups for a hypothetical state legislative contest. Each of the 32 candidates were given a political party and a random assortment of policy positions; in seven of the match-ups, one of the candidates was also assigned an “undemocratic position,” such as saying their party’s governor should ignore unfavorable court rulings by the other party’s appointed judges or that the governor should “rule by executive order” if the other party’s legislators “don’t cooperate.”

Source: Graham and Svolik

They found that only 13.1% of their respondents were “willing to punish a co-partisan for violating democratic principles by voting against their own party.” But that’s not all. Because the policy positions were randomly assigned, in some of the scenarios, the candidates’ policies and party didn’t necessarily line up (as seen above, with the pro-marijuana Republican and anti-marijuana Democrat).

When Graham and Svolik limited their findings to only scenarios where candidates’ party and policy aligned — meaning respondents of that party would have had to abandon someone from their tribe and someone who agreed with them on policy — the pool of voters willing to vote against their party’s undemocratic nominee shrunk even further.

Under those circumstances, they found, “only 3.5% of voters realistically punish violations of democratic principles in one of the world’s oldest democracies.”

Notably, in their study, neither Democrats nor Republicans were noticeably more willing than the other to abandon undemocratic candidates from their own party — although the responses varied in proportion with a participant’s level of partisanship. Independents who lean toward a party were the only group who defected from the undemocratic candidate in large enough numbers to defeat them. “A majority of strong partisans,” on the other hand, “would rather elect a candidate who violates democratic principles than cross party lines.”

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Again and again, pollsters have unearthed the same result: Americans’ appetite for punishing a leader’s anti-democratic behavior is highly contingent on the leader’s party.

An AP/NORC poll from earlier this year found that only 21% of Americans say it would be a “good thing” if “the next president” takes action on the country’s “important policy issues” without waiting for Congress or the courts. Seems simple enough. Americans oppose an all-powerful (dictatorial?) executive!

But then the poll asked the same question about Donald Trump, instead of the generic “next president.” Suddenly, the number of Republicans who thought it was a good idea for the president to take unilateral action shot up to 57%, while the Democratic number dropped to 4%. Change the question once again, to ask about Joe Biden, and now it was the Democrats’ turn to look past checks and balances: 39% said it would be a “good thing” for Biden to bypass the other branches of government. Republicans, meanwhile, had suddenly re-located their concern about the division of power: only 7% now felt unilateral action would be positive.

Source: Associated Press

At a very high level, Americans claim an opposition to dictatorship — but the more you delve into the data, the less they seem to mind when the aspiring dictator hails from their own party.

YouGov fielded a pair of identical polls in 2019 (during the Trump presidency) and 2022 (under Biden) to study this effect in the real world. Like the AP/NORC pollsters, the YouGov surveys found Republicans were more willing than Democrats to endorse anti-democratic behavior from their party — but that both sides were all to wiling to engage in “democracy hypocrisy,” as the researchers called the phenomenon.

In 2019, under Trump, 16% of Democrats and 55% of Republicans felt it was appropriate for the president to take unilateral executive action if “the president has sought compromise but Congress is playing partisan games.” Three years later, the numbers were flipped: 52% of Democrats and 14% of Republicans thought that was appropriate under Biden.

14% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans felt in 2019 that it was OK for the president to act unilaterally if he “knows it’s the right thing to do.” In 2022, 48% of Democrats and 12% of Republicans were willing to extend the same permissiveness.

Source: Democracy Fund

While the partisan bent of these responses is the most striking thing about them — it’s also notable that a double-digit chunk of either party is consistently willing to fork over unilateral power even to a president of the other party. Similarly, in the AP/NORC poll, 2 in 10 Americans felt it was a “good thing” for the “next president” — whoever it was — to bypass Congress and the courts; another 30% thought it was “neither good nor bad.”

Frankly, while partisanship acts as a force multiplier here, many Americans don’t seem that fazed by presidents acting unilaterally, even in the abstract. A recent U.S. News poll found that 57% of Americans believe the president should have “total, unchecked authority” — the exact words Harris used to warn about a theoretical Trump presidency.

These results, while surprising, may be less shocking when you take into account Americans’ dark opinions about our current system of government. Just 28% of adults told Gallup in January that American democracy is working. A New York Times/Siena poll last year found that 58% of Americans believe the U.S. political system “needs major reforms or a complete overhaul.” Young voters (especially young men), as I’ve noted previously, are especially sympathetic to this line of thinking.

The political scientist William Howell, of the University of Chicago, has argued that these are the exact circumstances under which voters are most likely to throng to populist leaders. “These underlying sources of extreme political disaffection give rise to greater distrust of governments,” he has written, and “encourage an embrace of alternatives that can provide ‘the people’ with a more effective form of government — notably, populist strongmen who take all authority into their own hands and promise to make things happen.”

Leaders, say, who promise “I alone can fix it.”

Political science experiments and polling data can’t tell us how voters will act in the real world. Faced with actual — not hypothetical — candidates who have engaged in anti-democratic behavior, voters in swing states (especially those independent leaners Graham and Svolik identified) overwhelmingly rejected them in the 2022 midterms.

Besides, in this election, even 3.5% of voters switching sides could be enough to make the difference.

Still, this body of research shows why Harris should not expect a groundswell in her favor despite Trump’s former aide referring to him as an aspiring dictator. In fact, it’s possible that Trump was elected in 2016 because of his promises to strengthen the presidency, not despite them. Reams of data suggest that Americans partisans are all too happy to look the other way when a candidate from their tribe tramples on democratic norms — in fact, if dissatisfied enough with the speed of change in government, they might even encourage it.

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The day ahead

• Vice President Kamala Harris will hold her first rally of the cycle with former President Barack Obama in Clarkston, Georgia. Gov. Tim Walz will hold campaign events in Greenville and Wilmington, North Carolina. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff will hold campaign events in Milwaukee and Kenosha, Wisconsin.

• Former President Donald Trump will hold a rally in Tempe, Arizona. Sen. JD Vance will hold an event in Waterford, Michigan. Lara Trump will hold a Team Trump Women’s Tour event in Fulton, Georgia. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will hold a Team Trump Make America Healthy Again event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

• President Biden has no public events on his schedule. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Qatar, a key mediator of the Israel/Hamas ceasefire negotiations, where he met with the emir and the prime minister earlier this morning. The House and Senate are on recess. The Supreme Court has no oral arguments.